Museum Studies Stories

“I knew that something I wanted in a community was to feel part of something bigger than myself, and that’s here at Bryn Mawr.”

"Don’t forget that Bryn Mawr is located in a unique place where you can explore new things and widen your horizons in ways you may not expect."

This 360 will examine that question in the context of Bryn Mawr College’s mineral collection: more than 40,000 specimens, most of which were sampled in the mid- to late-19th century.

In a fundamentally decolonial spirit, this course cluster examines the ways colonialism has contained, collected, captured, and commodified Blackness, a practice that circulates objectified images of the peoples, cultures, and cultural objects of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Students in this 360° will engage a deeper history of Contemporary Art—one that considers the ways in which an artwork's exhibition and its care structure its meaning in complex ways.

This 360° will consider differences in addressing academy and community as audiences, and bring together theoretical and practical aspects of art history, art criticism, art exhibition, and art education.

Participants will study the history and theories of self-portraiture, self-representation, and self-fashioning in cultures around the globe from antiquity to the present.